Mallets Aforethought (10 page)

I still couldn’t hold up the railing and reach the step treads at the same time. However, if something could hold it up for me . . . well, I didn’t quite stand there shouting Eureka!

But almost. I’d left the screws in a neat little pile near the bottom step, and they were still there. Humming, I took three of them and put them through the railing’s holes, not on a tread but where the railing attached to the front of the house.

Then I screwed them in and . . . presto, a railing holder-upper was born. Now that I’d had this inspiration I only needed about twenty minutes to get both railings back on.

When I was finished I backed away to admire my work, which was when I noticed something interesting: the bushes and whippy young trees in the unkempt yard, at the sides and extending back around to the rear of the house.

Thoughtfully I strolled around to inspect them. All along I had been wondering how someone got Hector’s body inside. After all, it wasn’t something you’d want to unload from right out in the street if you could help it.

And apparently the same new eyes that had seen how to repair that railing were still in decent working order, because now I saw how the body-delivery had been done. The whippy little trees, so flexible you could bend them flat and they would spring right up again, formed a solid screen. You could pull a car in here and haul a body out without being seen.

Then you could hunker down, hauling the body along, and get within a few feet of the front door—which you’d have unlocked in preparation—without risking discovery at all.

That last few feet would’ve been nerve-wracking, of course. But if you had the nerve to commit murder, last-minute anxiety would be just part of the cost of doing the deed.

From a distance the saplings seemed undamaged, upright and optimistic-appearing. But squinting closely I noticed their thin bark was scarred as if something had scraped against it.

A car’s front bumper, for instance. And the earth was humpy not with actual tire marks but with enough depression to indicate that a vehicle had been there.

The police would say (a) that it was George’s truck, or (b) that the marks meant nothing except that teenagers had been using this as a make-out spot.

But I didn’t think so, because according to Sam the hot make-out spot now was overlooking Dog Island—not, he had added swiftly, that he knew this from experience—and as for George’s truck it was junky but it was also very heavy; I thought it would have made much deeper impressions.

Not, again, that I expected police investigators to agree. So for now I decided to keep mum about my observation. It wouldn’t help George, there was a chance it could hurt him, and anyway I had other fish to fry this morning.

Thinking this, I walked a few blocks farther south before turning onto a tiny street whose dead end overlooked the skeleton of the old wharf.

Here a steep bluff dropped to a narrow stone beach studded with rotted wooden pilings. They were all that remained of a steamship terminal where once you could set off on a voyage that might end anywhere in the world. But steam had followed sail into mass-transit oblivion; now the red bricks of the steamship companies’ service buildings lay scattered among the wet stones, rounded to eroded lumps that from a distance resembled bloody fists.

At the end of the street stood a two-story frame bungalow with a tiny picket fence enclosing a small, well-kept yard. It was Jan Jesperson’s house. I followed a narrow walkway around to the rear, noting that as Will Bonnet had said, her car was not there. But through the sliding glass doors of the deck at the back I heard music playing inside, and when I peered in through cupped hands I saw the light on her electric percolator glowing red on a counter in the bright, efficient-looking kitchen.

So it seemed she’d returned from whatever trip Will thought she’d been away on. Sitting down on one of the luxurious wrought-iron lounge chairs she’d set up on the deck, I decided to wait. Ordinarily this wasn’t one of my favorite activities.

But I certainly couldn’t have found a more pleasant spot for cooling my heels. Latticed screens baffled the breeze without blocking the wide water view, while glass-topped tables and teak planters of dwarf evergreens created a luxurious atmosphere.

It was all very nicely done. But after the night I’d had, if I sat too long I would surely fall asleep, so after a few minutes I got up again and walked around, ending once more at the glass doors which featured an unobstructed view inside.

Being a pharmaceutical-company rep had apparently allowed Jan to take good care of herself. Her taste included Thomas Moser chairs, a sideboard displaying an elegant collection of Bohemian glass, a harpsichord with the Bach Two-Part Inventions open on it, and a trio of large framed photographs on a far wall.

Ansel Adams, if I wasn’t mistaken. Not too shabby. I tried the door, just experimentally. It slid open a crack, which on the one hand provided me with an interesting opportunity.

On the other, Jan would almost certainly be back any minute. People didn’t leave coffeemakers on and music playing in their houses otherwise. She might’ve just run out to get a newspaper.

“Hello?” I slid the glass door open another inch. If I heard her coming in the front I could always slip out the back, and vice versa. Silence within, except for the music. “Anyone home?”

No one was. A laptop in sleep mode, thriftily plugged into the wall instead of running down its battery, popped to glowing life as I touched its display. Beside it on the table were two utility-bill envelopes stamped and ready for mailing.

“Jan?” Her tiny living area was a model of order, with more of the lovely, expensive Thomas Moser stuff, an Oriental rug every strand of which was softly immaculate, lamps made of ginger jars with pleated cream shades. There were some good lithographs and small, well-framed European oils on the walls.

I took a few more steps. The books on the shelves were recent; she liked A.S. Byatt, P.D. James, and Margaret Drabble, David Foster Wallace, and John Updike, too, but only when he was writing about golf. The music was Miles Davis,
Sketches of Spain
on an expensive-looking CD player set to repeat.

There was no TV. As I noticed this it occurred to me that Jan might not be away. Instead she could be departed in the most final sense, and she could be around here somewhere.

And having come this far I supposed I’d better settle the question. What I would do if I found her I wasn’t sure. Or if she came home and found me, upstairs in her house.

But neither of these things happened; a pretty white-painted bedroom and neatly made-up bed were all I found at the top of the stairs. In the bath was a businesslike collection of toiletries and a few patent medicines. No prescription stuff that I could see, and certainly no stash of pilfered heavy-duty drugs from her pharmaceutical-sales career.

A sound made me peek hastily past the white eyelet curtain in the bathroom window, but it was only a couple of seagulls in a quarrel over a bit of something one of them had dropped. In the linen closet: linens.

And she wasn’t back yet. I was starting to think maybe she’d forgotten that coffeemaker, and the door. Maybe she’d gone out in such a hurry that she’d neglected to lock up.

Downstairs the CD player started in again on the “Adagio.” The lamps gleamed and the tables shimmered, glass on the photographs reflecting shards of light from south-facing windows. It all had the clean, well-ordered air I always aspired to and could never manage.

But there was a hardness to it too; motionless, nothing out of place. There wasn’t any desk to rummage through and the few drawers I opened contained only domestic items: scissors, knives. At last I went back to the glass doors, feeling it was probably time to get out. I’d come to speak with her, hoping she might not be the icy villainess local rumor portrayed. Maybe something she said would give me a way to help George.

And by doing so, help Ellie. Secretly I thought of it as a sort of going-away present, because although she didn’t know it and would have fiercely denied it had the idea been suggested to her, once the baby was born nothing would ever be the same again.

Selfish thought; I put it away with the many others I didn’t like thinking lately. And at any rate wherever Jan had gone, it seemed she wasn’t coming back immediately.

Outside, one of the seagulls grabbed the fallen morsel and flapped off, leaving the other poking disconsolately at the place where it had been.

Yeah, buddy, I know how you feel,
I thought. Then, turning, I realized that something in Jan’s house
wasn’t
motionless.

The laptop screen. When I’d touched it, it had pinged softly and the screen had bloomed to life, showing the Apple icon. But after I’d left it there on the table it had gone on booting up. Now it showed a screen of labeled folders and a cursor, blinking provocatively at me.

So there I was, alone and uninvited in a stranger’s home. Before me lay, apparently, all the records of her private life; a folder marked “Bills” for instance, and one that said it held letters.

Let’s see, now. I could respect her privacy, not to mention my own safety. She could walk in and discover me here any second.

Or I could go for broke. Moments later I’d opened a folder, clicked through the documents it contained, and found at least two reasons to make me envision Jan Jesperson jumping for joy when she learned Hector Gosling was no longer among the living.

Assuming she hadn’t murdered him herself, a notion that was starting to look increasingly plausible. One of the documents, a list of Eastport ladies including Agnes Bonnet and George’s aunt, Paula Valentine, also featured a schedule of dates and dosages of a variety of drugs. One of them was diazepam, better known as Valium.

Risky, I thought, to keep such a list. But if you had more than one scheme going you needed some kind of reminder as to who got what substance and when. And if what this schedule suggested was true, Hector could have implicated Jan Jesperson in at least one murder—Paula Valentine’s—and possibly more.

But the kicker was spread out through the last documents I clicked open. One was a calculation of how much Valium it would take to kill a 160-pound human being, with or without the help of various amounts of alcohol. Was it coincidental that Hector Gosling had been average sized? He’d probably weighed about 160 pounds, which was no help in the strychnine department; still, I found it interesting.

The second document was Jan’s last will and testament, in which she generously left the whole kit and kaboodle to “my good friend and associate Hector Gosling.”

And the final item contained Hector’s will, in language a near twin to Jan’s. In it he bequeathed an even larger estate full of cash, stocks, bonds, real estate, accounts receivable, and other valuable doo-dads, to . . .

You guessed it: turnabout was the only kind of fair play these two had ever cared for. He’d left it all to his partner in crime, Jan Jesperson.

“The wills were dated the same day,” I said. “And it looked as if each of them had e-mailed a copy of his or her own document to the other one.”

Silence on the phone; I interpreted it as Clarissa Arnold’s awestruck admiration for my intrepid sleuthing. I’d called her answering service and by a miracle she’d called me back at once.

“Which would’ve made sense,” I pressed on. “Neither one of them could afford to have anyone else find out just how wealthy they’d really gotten.”

I took a breath. “Because rumors are one thing, but the size of those estates, the schedules of assets . . . it would absolutely raise questions about how they had gotten all that stuff. That’s why whichever one survived the other’s death had to inherit the loot. To avoid answering those questions.”

I thought a minute more. “The probate records would still end up in the public files. But by that time interest would’ve died down. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best possible way to try keeping a low profile, under the circumstances.”

Clarissa’s silence continued. “Well?” I said at last. “Don’t you think this establishes some kind of reasonable doubt? George wasn’t the only one with a motive. Or even the best motive.”

Hector could have tried grabbing more by blackmailing Jan. Or she could’ve decided to eliminate any chance of his trying it. Then there was the whole dosage-schedule thing and the notes on how to kill somebody with Valium. I described them to Clarissa. “Maybe she was planning to kill him with Valium, then got hold of something even deadlier and changed her plan,” I concluded.

“Great,” she responded skeptically. “And you were planning on proving any of this how?”

Drat. Trust a lawyer to throw cold water on your notions. If Clarissa’s hard-headed practicality could be dumped on forest fires we wouldn’t need Smokey the Bear.

“Well,” I said, “maybe the court could subpoena the laptop.”

“Uh-huh. Because the defendant’s friend saw it while trespassing in the laptop owner’s house.”

Just then the refrigerator out in the kitchen quit humming and the light on the answering machine went out.

“Damn,” I said.

“What?”

“Oh, not you,” I told Clarissa hastily. The answering machine went back on and the refrigerator resumed humming. “I think the power just switched back from the generator to the Bangor Hydro grid, that’s all.”

“Oh. Anyway, I can’t just have you testify to this, either. The prosecution would get the jury to ignore your testimony, because a) you’ve admitted you have no scruples since otherwise why would you sneak into her house and snoop, so they’ll decide you’re lying. And b) you’re George’s friend, so likewise.”

She paused. “I’m assuming you don’t have a printout of those files?”

“Nope,” I replied, crestfallen. Damn it, I should have just grabbed the thing when I had the chance. “No printer. And I knew all that, what you said. I was hoping you’d be able to figure out a way around it, is all.”

She replied doubtfully. “If there turns out to be any Valium in Hector’s tox screens, I could try.” Then she sighed. “Believe me, Jake, I know this looks good to you but you’re a long way from anything that’s actually going to be useful. And if Jan Jesperson gets wind of it, that laptop’s going to end up somewhere no one can ever find it again and this whole discussion will be moot. So keep quiet, and I mean don’t tell
anyone,
not even Ellie. I need to think about this.”